Helen Magill White (1853-1944) was the first woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. She earned her doctoral degree in Greek from Boston University in 1877.

Raised in a Quaker family, White always believed that she was deserving of the same education as a man. Her father was the president of Swarthmore College, which she attended as an undergraduate.

She taught at the Howard Collegiate Institute, Evelyn College (a now-defunct women's annex at Princeton University), and Brooklyn High School before marrying Andrew Dickson White in 1890. Dickson was a friend of her father's and the retired president of Cornell University, whom she had met in 1887 while presenting a paper at the American Social Science Association.

After marrying Dickson, she retired from academia, accompanying her husband to diplomatic posts in St. Petersburg and Berlin and speaking against women's suffrage in 1913.

External links

• The Helen Magill White Papers at Cornell University